Starting with the emergence of Neorealism in the early 1940s, Italian cinema has been an essential point of reference not just for the European new waves that followed, but also for several emerging cinematic traditions across the globe— the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 70s, African cinemas of the 1970s, American independent filmmaking and countless others. In this regard, Italian cinema remains one of the most celebrated and discussed traditions in the English-speaking world.

Despite many cultural cycles since, Italian films have demonstrated a robust presence throughout the years, participating in the festival circuit and winning in the most important of them. In contrast to Italy's landmark sociologically-driven films of the 1940s, the existential films of Antonioni, the satirical films of Fellini, or the pungent oeuvre of Pasolini, the works presented in Italian Opera Prima explore individual pursuits of identity and the intricate connection of such quests with memory and space. The characters in these documentary and narrative films are ambiguous, contradictory, complex and the films, insofar as they privilege images over words, impart a certain tragic side to the characters and their inner quandaries.

Arianna explores the puzzled connections between identity, memory, and space in Lake Bolsena. Arianna wanders through rooms in the house where she spent her early childhood, linking objects she sees to her recollections. She is silently and sometimes desperately trying to decipher who she was as a child and who she is becoming.

Carlo Lavagna's luminous film is permeated by a gentle blue light that, far from creating a serene atmosphere, accentuates tensions between the members of this family of three. Despite the aesthetic beauty that surrounds the characters (furniture, landscape, clothing) there is something profoundly unsettling in the household. The parents are excessively happy in their marriage, and seem far too pleased with their relationship with a 19-year old who hasn't had her first period and clearly doesn't fell great in her skin. The arrival of an outsider to this nucleus and a link to the past— the neighbor and Arianna's uncle Arduino— is the first element to disturbs the peace, triggering a puzzling quest Arianna will pursue to the end.

Frugal in dialogue and abundant in masterful cinematography, the film's tense atmosphere is teeming with thoughts and feelings that have been silenced for years. These cinematic elements moreover enable the film to grasp Arianna's innermost conflicts throughout her journey.

Identity and its juxtaposition with landscape and memory equally drives Eleonora Danco's documentary N-Capace. Her camera roams through the streets of Terracina, a city and commune southeast of Rome. Danco struggles to apprehend her own life story in a city that has changed dramatically, and therefore turns to interrogating Terracina's elders and youngsters alike.

What we learn from these interactions is that different generations share the same space, yet have divergent outlooks on life. Danco resists romanticizing the past, instead allowing older women to talk about the brutality of their relationships with parents and husbands. She incisively questions the young men and women who don't seem capable or willing to commit to things are apparently important to her such as art, knowledge, affection and relationships. Amidst the world that preceded her and the one taking shape before her eyes, Danco wanders through the city wearing pajamas and confronting modernizing spaces she cannot connect to anymore.

When pushed, Danco's father says he does not deserve heaven but rather hell, "because I have remorse, regrets— because I thought life would be always the same; that you would always feel young, robust, capable, but suddenly you realize that life ends," underscoring where Danco positions herself— in a melancholic space intertwined with surreal, hilarious moments that lend the film a certain lightness against the more exhausting philosophical explorations.

At some point, Danco asks her father if it wouldn't be much better to accept who one is regardless of the regrets one may have. Though rhetorical, this inquiry comprises the spine of the film itself: an artist's means of coming to terms with the meaning of her own story and identity.

A group of elder friends gather to discuss boar hunting and the life of Mario de Marcella, a hermit living in the woods in Pratolongo, near Rome. They called him Il Solengo, a reference in Tuscan dialect to a boar stranded from the herd. Mario is a riddle, a mysterious character in Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis' Il Solengo, a raw and melancholic film that explores the conundrums of a man's identity reconstructed through the people who claim to have known him.

Mario's eccentricities are relayed by his 'friends' against images of a dry and wild terrain, a landscape that transmits hostility and somehow underscores the intrinsic pain of living. This pain is more evident in some lives than in others. Mario's elusive nature, the reasons for his detachment from society remain an enigma much like his unhappiness The mysteries enclosing Mario de Marcella persist throughout a film that is explicitly not interested in unveiling them.

Lamberto's Sanfelice's Cloro explores the riddle of maturation. Jenny is a teenager confronted with the death of her mother and her father's resulting nervous breakdown. Along with her younger brother they leave the beach town of Ostia and move to a hostile and snowy mountain town in Abruzzo.

Jenny is also obsessed with synchronized swimming, practicing relentlessly to somehow escape the tough reality of her everyday life. Her anger is thus aimed at everybody and everything she blames for the impossibility of doing what she loves. The bleakness of the landscape echoes her own desperation, which yields only briefly during her clandestine moments swimming in the pool of the hotel where she works in as a maid.

The pool also becomes the setting of Jenny's emotional connection with Yvan, a Yugoslavian immigrant and watchman of the hotel. By turning a blind eye and allowing her to swim, Yvan transforms her connections to the outside world, including her family members. The hostile landscape suddenly changes, becoming an affective space that allows her to reconnect with her little brother.

The four films comprising Opera Prima Italiana are visually embedded in an achingly nostalgic beauty that expresses the conflicts of their characters. Less invested in sociological arguments about reality, the films share an evocative beauty that is retained by the depth of characters— a phenomenon more clearly defined than has been in Italian cinema during the past sixty years.